PHOTOGRAPHY VIEW

PHOTOGRAPHY VIEW; TWO GIANTS OF MODERNISM AT OPPOSITE POLES

Published: September 13, 1987

Correction Appended

(Page 2 of 2)

The exhibition that is the armature for this thesis contains a great many photographs that have not been seen before, as well as an ample share of classics. While some of the unfamiliar pictures are entertaining, their main purpose seems to be to bolster the connection with Surrealism. Thus we see a 1931 portrait of the painter Leonor Fini with a stocking pulled over her head, the features of her face grotesquely distorted, and an image of a bloodied animal hide on the pavement outside a slaughterhouse. But on balance it seems fair to conclude that Cartier-Bresson has been an excellent editor of his work, since the classic images are usually the most engaging.

Also on view are a handful of the artist's paintings from the 20's and a photomontage from 1931. The two earliest paintings recall Impressionism, but the others prove that Cartier-Bresson was a disciple of Surrealism even before he discovered that the camera was an instrument more capable of illustrating the unobserved marvels of life.

Compared to the urbane Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston was a primitive. While he kept tabs on modern art, and was an early appreciator of Atget (as were the Surrealists), his grasp was essentially visual. Where Cartier-Bresson tried to show that art was manifest in ordinary life, Weston for most of his career attempted to eliminate ordinary life from his frame, seeing art only in the form of the ideal. Indeed, this could be said to be the essential proposition of his work. So during the 30's he abjured Surrealism in favor of Cubism and the machine-age esthetic.

But ''A Centennial Retrospective'' does not attempt to put Weston's work in this context, or any other. The more than 120 prints in the exhibition - they were installed by the Met's Maria Morris Hambourg, and represent about half the number in the original version of the show, which opened last year at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art with the infelicitous title ''Supreme Instants'' -reflect the standard, chronological ''phases'' of Weston's career. We see examples of his Pictorialist portrait period, his conversion in Mexico to sharp-focus rendition, his classic close-ups of vegetables and nudes, landscapes done while traveling on Guggenheim funds, and finally the fugal, entropic pictures taken on Point Lobos in California at the end of his career.

This recitation represents the prevailing understanding of Weston's work, and to no surprise, since the pictures in the exhibition was selected by Beaumont Newhall together with James Alinder, the director of the Center for Creative Photography. Unlike the Cartier-Bresson show, then, this exhibition serves mainly as an appreciation.

At the same time, however, the exhibition also permits a different reading of Weston: that he was, like Edward Hopper, an artist who had to struggle through and against the prevailing styles of vanguard art to arrive at his own unique, individual means of expression. His real arrival came, one could argue from the evidence of the show, at the end of his career, when he forsook unified, central subjects and began making complex, resonant pictures from seemingly intractable natural objects, such as sand, rock and seaweed. In these photographs, the subject is no longer iconic; indeed, it hardly seems to matter. In this sense, Weston's late work is remarkably similar to Cartier-Bresson's prodigious early work. By making pictures without a clear hierarchy of subject matter, both men realized, in photographs, the objectives of Modernism.

In terms of their attitudes toward the photograph itself, however, the two artists are clearly at odds. Cartier-Bresson disdained darkroom work, letting a lab produce his prints, while Weston was the consummate, sometimes obsessive craftsman. The difference shows in the exhibitions. The prints in the Weston show, all from the Weston archive of the Center for Creative Photography, are not always the best extant examples of Weston's craft, but they have a richness and fullness we expect of works of art on paper. Cartier-Bresson's prints - especially those made specifically for the show - seem harsh and uneven.

This is not so much a criticism as an instructive comparison. Cartier-Bresson was interested more in the activity of photographing than in the process of making prints. He also worked with the printed page in mind, and his pictures look their best in reproduction. To Weston, the photographic print was the ultimate product of his art. This distinction between photographers also focuses attention on a distinction one finds within the ranks of curators, especially at the Museum of Modern Art. In Mr. Newhall's time it was important to have an eye for beautiful objects, but not necessarily to have a thesis. Today, the reverse seems to hold sway.

''Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Early Work'' remains at the Museum of Modern Art through Nov. 29, after which it will travel to the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego; the Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, Mass.; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. It was financed in part by Champagne Taittinger and the International Herald Tribune. ''Edward Weston: A Centennial Retrospective'' is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through Oct. 31. As ''Supreme Instants'' it will travel on to the National Museum of American Art in Washington, the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and an additional six venues.